Foreign women in academia: double strangers between productivity, marginalization and resistance

This article examines the professional experience of foreign women academics working across geographic boundaries in today’s neoliberal academia characterised by liquidity. Framed within an intersectional perspective, we use the concept of the ‘double-stranger’ to examine data stemming from 20 in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted with scholars at different stages of their career in the social sciences. This paper advances understandings of academic careers theoretically by identifying a temporal and hierarchical dynamic in the intersection of two categories of difference (gender and foreignness) that constitute a position of simultaneous belonging and non-belonging for foreign women academics; and empirically through a qualitative investigation that explores three areas in which academic professional experiences are mobilised for double-strangers: (1) transnational career moves; (2) productivity and performance in today’s neoliberal academia; and (3) self-induced estrangement as a form of resistance.